I finally convinced my mom to switch a few weeks ago (ok well maybe leo laport (sp?) did). First off she was expecting some big differences but thought it looked and felt the same. The main thing she misses is the autofill from google toolbar. Get this, she asked why there was no history button on the toolbar. So I said "I could fix that" but before I could steal the mouse away, she was already setting it up on her own... I was so proud *wipes tear from eye*
That being said, IE is still the default browser because of my dad. I know better then to give firefox to someone who hasn't mastered the intracacies of the right-click or double-click. Yes he has to take his hand off the mouse to find the right mouse button... *sigh*
The sad thing.. 25 years ago, my dad was doing some fortran programs (not as his job, but as a small part of his job) and little later we had an apple2 that he used to teach us kids some BASIC. Where do they go wrong...
Oh ya this was supposed to be about firefox.. well I've done my part in switching 3 people, where's my certificate and lapel pin.
Bluffs aren't useful when being underestimated, but when being overestimated.
If I throw my bishop before your pawn, and you KNOW you're better then me, and you don't see any complications, you'll take it.
But if you KNOW I'm better then you, it causes hesitation. The bluff only works because that presumption I know something you don't.
I assume what he means by "true AI" is that it'd be able to self-learn more general knowledge then chess (or other things that succumb to brute force algorithm) and is based on pattern forming (similar to life). This would mean the computer would be capable of recognizing the opponent is much better after playing many games (and recommend movies to him based on his game... well maybe not). Bluffs like this may cause the computer to misclassify moves as more critical then others (afterall if my opponent is so good, why would he sacrifice that piece unless he had a plan!) and waste time on it. However, the greater part of the bluff on humans is at the emotional level and this AI should be immune to it.
Define General Knowledge? What is it? What isn't general knowledge?
Should government be funding Fahreinheit 9/11 as general knowledge? Should government be funding Christian encyclopedias as general knowledge?
In that regard it's very similar to art. It's easy to say "art is good for society" but that doesn't mean all art is good for society. If you fund arts, you get all sorts of junk being claimed as art.
Now what do you suppose would happen if there was a broad budget to fund things like wikipedia? Many sites would be spouting sewage as knowledge under government funding.
Yes advocating for wikipedia funding is a special interest, to label it as general knowledge is just bias. It's very much like if NRA lobby congress and I said "Peace and Security is a special interest?
I have a suspicion about a gas station near me. One day when my car was on the very verge of empty, I bought 17 gallons for my 16 gallon tank. I stopped going there.
Competition, since parents would have some choice. If they can make profit while offering competitive services as public schools and at a cheaper rate, then is there anything wrong with that? It'd still be an improvement over the status quo.
By harnassing the power of competition though, parents will have the choice to send to schools that buy classrooms instead of astroturf for the stadium. Thats what happened at the local high school, they use trailers for classrooms, but they managed to afford a big electric scoreboard and astroturf.
Furthermore the parent has no say in curriculum without choice. What if I want my child to study hard sciences. What if I don't want my child to learn sex ed or what if I want my child to learn sex ed in the first grade (Yes I know it's the parents responsibility, but the government has already decided to teach it)?
Education isn't a free service, it's something you pay for even if its laundered through taxation. The average cost per pupil at public school is $7k ( http://www.edsource.org/sch_ca_behind_states.cfm). Take $5k and offer it as a voucher for the parent to spend on private school and they'll have a choice. The other $2k is free to be used on other things, they could spend it to improve the public schools even.
By the chart I linked to you can see 30 years ago the price was $2k a student in public schools. Are the schools that much better then back then? The primary difference is the bureaucracy that's getting in the way, and the only way to fix it is to trim that bureaucracy.
You're right the immediate consequences were bad for the Americans. However my point was it expanded the habitat for humanity (no not Carter's organization). If they tried to stabilize the status quo so they could give everyone a decent living, what would have happened? Well I can't say for sure, but the population can't grow unchecked, some other way would crop up to kill off the excess.
Frontiers give freedom to break from the status quo... If a group of people wanted to form a new government today, how would they do it? There's no where left to emigrate to. I'm not arrogant enough to think that democracy is the *ideal* solution, but experimentation and competition could lead to better systems. 500 years ago, would any country be able to get away with NOT having an aristocracy?
But lemme ask you, do you think the world would be better off today if the new and old world never met? The point I was making had nothing to do with how the exploration was exploited, my point was that in principle the exploration was "a good thing".
Things will never improve enough to say "Okay now that everyone is fed, we have the resources to explore" but if don't work to expand our habitat tomorrow we may be starving more people then we are today.
That just shifts the scams to the seller side. Since the seller can "prove" he sent the item whether it contains the goods or not. What can the buyer do if it contains only 1copper.
At least with the sellers getting scammed it keeps the item selling in check. With a buyer-gets-scammed system, I think the market would be larger then currently.
Cut the commercial break and put them as a banner on the bottom (and side to maintain aspect ratio). Yes it's intrusive, but its less intrusive then commercial breaks. Plus it wouldn't be fair to compare the intrusiveness versus the nonlegitimate BT sources.
Yes because things were so nice in the 15th century when there were the important sailing expeditions right? or when DaVinci did his work?
Spain wasn't in the middle of the inquisition. Spain didn't just go through Reconquista. Constantinople wasn't overran by the Turks. The plague and the hundred years war were far in the past. And of course no one starved then either right?
Instead DaVinci should of become a doctor, Columbus a farmer. We'd be much better off if they took care of their immediate needs right?
It's natural ecology, people will always die. There are ALWAYS population controls. If you solve the problem of rabbits being eaten by predators, then the population explodes and there isn't enough food. Are they better off because less are being eaten? If you solve the food problem (actually delay would be better word) then the population becomes dense enough that disease runs rampant. Are they better off?
There will always be a shortage of resources, we could try to improve the efficiency of distribution of resources (we could feed everyone on earth now, but that doesn't mean we can feed the next generation) but better yet would be to grow our resource pool by colonizing new frontiers. If we stay on earth there is a limit to growth. We won't solve famine, war, disease by just throwing our resources at them. They'll all get worse as the population grows, thats ecology.
UV into the eye will dump most of its energy in the lens and cornea. Cataracts minimum at air-ionization levels (Not that it matters: The lightning bolt lands microseconds later, and the eye's structure pipes it straight into the center of the brain.)
You're right, we should stick with current tasers and shoot darts in peoples eyes, followed by the shock.
Well as I understand it, which might well be wrong, the type of RFID being implemented in stores consists of a tag which responds to radio stimulation, similar to the way a reflector responds to a beam of light. So if I can't see a reflector 50 feet away with my maglite, I go to get a much bigger, brighter light and shine that on the reflector, and I'll have a greater chance of seeing it. Even if the tags are passive, what's to stop anybody from just using a massively powerful reader from a greater distance?
A laser falloff is linear, so if you want to double the effective distance, you double the power.
For RF if you want to double the distance, you have to quadruple the power. So to change 18 inches to 300 feet, you'd need a scanner thats 40000 times more powerful. With that much power it's likely to cause problems to the RFID's that are 18 inches away because they're not designed to withstand all that.
The 300ft RF described in this story is an active RFID with a battery. In other words it no longer needs to receive power from the transmitter signal.
As a side note, what I said is not completely true, because increasing signal power is just one alternative, they could increase the size of the antenna (on the RFID or the scanner). This is also prohibitive though because of the ratios required, so the point is the same.
You do realize there is not one standard for RFID right? There's all sorts of RFID's that aren't compatable with eachother. There's RFID's that measure temperature so they can tell you if food has spoiled during shipping. There's RFID's that can be disabled by a certain signal... etc
An RFID designed to be read from 18 inches won't be read by this RFID scanner from 300 feet (if that scanner can even read it properly from the 18 inches). Furthermore the RFID's intended for products can be disabled.
The simple solution is to not buy things containing RFID's if you oppose them and let the free market decide. It'll be a rare product that will include an unkillable tamperproof RFID that can be scanned from 300 feet, so oppose it. The public will dictate what kind of RFID's are reasonable (although you may disagree with society over what is reasonable).
Funny thing is at the same time the government is taking away the last shreds of our privacy, they're talking about changing the freedom of information laws to prevent citizens from finding out what _they_ are up to.
Even though I consider myself a libertarian, I for one am completely in favor of full public surveillance (a very small minority on/.). However that also means the government should have very little privacy period. The government acts as agents of the public they should be under public scrutiny and accountability.
The road to a totalarian government is not by removing public privacy (yes the oxymoron is the point), but by giving privacy to government. I think most people would agree that the quality of a democracy (or representative democracy) is directly proportional to how informed the public is. Granted currently our expectations are mostly unfair, we expect people to be publically infallible, which is why politicians think that kind of thing can help them. But expectations can be quickly changed if the rules change.
For those of us who do realise we argue, we protest, the government ignores us. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Ah yes.. the other side just doesn't realise then. Since obviously no one could support it if they understood as well as I understand it. Since they aren't protesting it, they must be therefore be dumber then myself.
That post was dripping with arrogance, and if you want people to take you seriously maybe it's time to tone it down.
Wow I'm glad you cured me of my mistake. For a second I thought these RFID were just RFID's, but little did I know these RFID crawl around planting cameras in peoples homes and brainwashing people. I was never aware the RFID's were that advanced.
There's a big difference between surveillance in public and surveillance in private. As long as you're on public roads, you should expect to be observed. I and everyone else pays to keep that road maintained and safe. The consequence of which is the public has the right to assure that individuals using that road doesn't hinder the safety of that road. If I step in your home or your shop, I assume you could be recording my actions.
I'm concerned about transponders for every person. I'm concerned about the security of its implementation. I'm concerned about the cost. I'm concerned about side-effects. But mostly I'm concerned the reason it won't happen is merely irrational fears. It should happen, and its time the government got off it's ass and prepared for it.
Ask yourself whats the biggest threat to your safety and well-being right now and in the likely future? Do you find it more likely that you'll be wrongfully accused and sentenced to death or killed in the process of a repeat offender committing a crime? In the ideal world we'd have both our privacy and there'd be world peace and good will towards all. It's not an ideal world though and there are tradeoffs. I consider public surveillance worth the improvements in law enforcement, obviously not everyone agrees.
But if you prefer it in slippery slope format here you are:
First the tinfoilers started insisting there shouldn't be surveillance in public places. That was fine, I didn't mind it. Then they expected no surveillance when they came into my home, well it was only polite I guess.
Then they asked that I don't look at them, because I was violating their privacy. Well they were whackos anyways, I could try to avoid interacting with them. Then they made the machines to pluck out everyone's eyeballs so no one would could violate their privacy. And we tried to stop them, but no one knew where they were.
Slashdot Mirror
I finally convinced my mom to switch a few weeks ago (ok well maybe leo laport (sp?) did). First off she was expecting some big differences but thought it looked and felt the same. The main thing she misses is the autofill from google toolbar. Get this, she asked why there was no history button on the toolbar. So I said "I could fix that" but before I could steal the mouse away, she was already setting it up on her own... I was so proud *wipes tear from eye*
That being said, IE is still the default browser because of my dad. I know better then to give firefox to someone who hasn't mastered the intracacies of the right-click or double-click. Yes he has to take his hand off the mouse to find the right mouse button... *sigh*
The sad thing.. 25 years ago, my dad was doing some fortran programs (not as his job, but as a small part of his job) and little later we had an apple2 that he used to teach us kids some BASIC. Where do they go wrong...
Oh ya this was supposed to be about firefox.. well I've done my part in switching 3 people, where's my certificate and lapel pin.
popups in firefox courtesy of Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Bluffs aren't useful when being underestimated, but when being overestimated.
If I throw my bishop before your pawn, and you KNOW you're better then me, and you don't see any complications, you'll take it.
But if you KNOW I'm better then you, it causes hesitation. The bluff only works because that presumption I know something you don't.
I assume what he means by "true AI" is that it'd be able to self-learn more general knowledge then chess (or other things that succumb to brute force algorithm) and is based on pattern forming (similar to life). This would mean the computer would be capable of recognizing the opponent is much better after playing many games (and recommend movies to him based on his game... well maybe not). Bluffs like this may cause the computer to misclassify moves as more critical then others (afterall if my opponent is so good, why would he sacrifice that piece unless he had a plan!) and waste time on it. However, the greater part of the bluff on humans is at the emotional level and this AI should be immune to it.
Disclaimer: IANACM (chessmaster) IANAAIP (AI programmer)
Define General Knowledge? What is it? What isn't general knowledge?
Should government be funding Fahreinheit 9/11 as general knowledge?
Should government be funding Christian encyclopedias as general knowledge?
In that regard it's very similar to art. It's easy to say "art is good for society" but that doesn't mean all art is good for society. If you fund arts, you get all sorts of junk being claimed as art.
Now what do you suppose would happen if there was a broad budget to fund things like wikipedia? Many sites would be spouting sewage as knowledge under government funding.
Yes advocating for wikipedia funding is a special interest, to label it as general knowledge is just bias. It's very much like if NRA lobby congress and I said "Peace and Security is a special interest?
I have a suspicion about a gas station near me. One day when my car was on the very verge of empty, I bought 17 gallons for my 16 gallon tank. I stopped going there.
Even supposing everyone under 40 was instantly killed. I imagine somehow cloning would be made feasible and very fast.
-Speeding doesn't cause accidents.
-Smoking doesn't cause cancer.
But thats because instead of "cause" it should say there is a positive correlation.
Are you going to argue the point that there's not a correlation between speeding and accidents?
Competition, since parents would have some choice. If they can make profit while offering competitive services as public schools and at a cheaper rate, then is there anything wrong with that? It'd still be an improvement over the status quo.
. Take $5k and offer it as a voucher for the parent to spend on private school and they'll have a choice. The other $2k is free to be used on other things, they could spend it to improve the public schools even.
By harnassing the power of competition though, parents will have the choice to send to schools that buy classrooms instead of astroturf for the stadium. Thats what happened at the local high school, they use trailers for classrooms, but they managed to afford a big electric scoreboard and astroturf.
Furthermore the parent has no say in curriculum without choice. What if I want my child to study hard sciences. What if I don't want my child to learn sex ed or what if I want my child to learn sex ed in the first grade (Yes I know it's the parents responsibility, but the government has already decided to teach it)?
Education isn't a free service, it's something you pay for even if its laundered through taxation. The average cost per pupil at public school is $7k ( http://www.edsource.org/sch_ca_behind_states.cfm)
By the chart I linked to you can see 30 years ago the price was $2k a student in public schools. Are the schools that much better then back then? The primary difference is the bureaucracy that's getting in the way, and the only way to fix it is to trim that bureaucracy.
You're right the immediate consequences were bad for the Americans. However my point was it expanded the habitat for humanity (no not Carter's organization). If they tried to stabilize the status quo so they could give everyone a decent living, what would have happened? Well I can't say for sure, but the population can't grow unchecked, some other way would crop up to kill off the excess.
Frontiers give freedom to break from the status quo... If a group of people wanted to form a new government today, how would they do it? There's no where left to emigrate to. I'm not arrogant enough to think that democracy is the *ideal* solution, but experimentation and competition could lead to better systems. 500 years ago, would any country be able to get away with NOT having an aristocracy?
But lemme ask you, do you think the world would be better off today if the new and old world never met? The point I was making had nothing to do with how the exploration was exploited, my point was that in principle the exploration was "a good thing".
Things will never improve enough to say "Okay now that everyone is fed, we have the resources to explore" but if don't work to expand our habitat tomorrow we may be starving more people then we are today.
Explain, why can't it?
Just because its privatized doesn't mean it can't be government funded (vouchers) and it still can be required to meet federal requirements.
Half? getting a lot better value then that, since many teams are putting forth different designs. You get a quasi-survival of the fittest.
Yesterday was only about Private manned launch. Private satellites have been going up for a long while.
That just shifts the scams to the seller side. Since the seller can "prove" he sent the item whether it contains the goods or not. What can the buyer do if it contains only 1copper.
At least with the sellers getting scammed it keeps the item selling in check. With a buyer-gets-scammed system, I think the market would be larger then currently.
Cut the commercial break and put them as a banner on the bottom (and side to maintain aspect ratio). Yes it's intrusive, but its less intrusive then commercial breaks. Plus it wouldn't be fair to compare the intrusiveness versus the nonlegitimate BT sources.
Yes because things were so nice in the 15th century when there were the important sailing expeditions right? or when DaVinci did his work?
Spain wasn't in the middle of the inquisition.
Spain didn't just go through Reconquista.
Constantinople wasn't overran by the Turks.
The plague and the hundred years war were far in the past.
And of course no one starved then either right?
Instead DaVinci should of become a doctor, Columbus a farmer. We'd be much better off if they took care of their immediate needs right?
It's natural ecology, people will always die. There are ALWAYS population controls. If you solve the problem of rabbits being eaten by predators, then the population explodes and there isn't enough food. Are they better off because less are being eaten? If you solve the food problem (actually delay would be better word) then the population becomes dense enough that disease runs rampant. Are they better off?
There will always be a shortage of resources, we could try to improve the efficiency of distribution of resources (we could feed everyone on earth now, but that doesn't mean we can feed the next generation) but better yet would be to grow our resource pool by colonizing new frontiers. If we stay on earth there is a limit to growth. We won't solve famine, war, disease by just throwing our resources at them. They'll all get worse as the population grows, thats ecology.
The corners were overpowered so the developers made these changes to balance the game. Now the center is competitive with the corners again!
UV into the eye will dump most of its energy in the lens and cornea. Cataracts minimum at air-ionization levels (Not that it matters: The lightning bolt lands microseconds later, and the eye's structure pipes it straight into the center of the brain.)
You're right, we should stick with current tasers and shoot darts in peoples eyes, followed by the shock.
Don't forget safer.
Well as I understand it, which might well be wrong, the type of RFID being implemented in stores consists of a tag which responds to radio stimulation, similar to the way a reflector responds to a beam of light. So if I can't see a reflector 50 feet away with my maglite, I go to get a much bigger, brighter light and shine that on the reflector, and I'll have a greater chance of seeing it. Even if the tags are passive, what's to stop anybody from just using a massively powerful reader from a greater distance?
A laser falloff is linear, so if you want to double the effective distance, you double the power.
For RF if you want to double the distance, you have to quadruple the power. So to change 18 inches to 300 feet, you'd need a scanner thats 40000 times more powerful. With that much power it's likely to cause problems to the RFID's that are 18 inches away because they're not designed to withstand all that.
The 300ft RF described in this story is an active RFID with a battery. In other words it no longer needs to receive power from the transmitter signal.
As a side note, what I said is not completely true, because increasing signal power is just one alternative, they could increase the size of the antenna (on the RFID or the scanner). This is also prohibitive though because of the ratios required, so the point is the same.
You do realize there is not one standard for RFID right? There's all sorts of RFID's that aren't compatable with eachother. There's RFID's that measure temperature so they can tell you if food has spoiled during shipping. There's RFID's that can be disabled by a certain signal... etc
An RFID designed to be read from 18 inches won't be read by this RFID scanner from 300 feet (if that scanner can even read it properly from the 18 inches). Furthermore the RFID's intended for products can be disabled.
The simple solution is to not buy things containing RFID's if you oppose them and let the free market decide. It'll be a rare product that will include an unkillable tamperproof RFID that can be scanned from 300 feet, so oppose it. The public will dictate what kind of RFID's are reasonable (although you may disagree with society over what is reasonable).
Funny thing is at the same time the government is taking away the last shreds of our privacy, they're talking about changing the freedom of information laws to prevent citizens from finding out what _they_ are up to.
/.). However that also means the government should have very little privacy period. The government acts as agents of the public they should be under public scrutiny and accountability.
Even though I consider myself a libertarian, I for one am completely in favor of full public surveillance (a very small minority on
The road to a totalarian government is not by removing public privacy (yes the oxymoron is the point), but by giving privacy to government. I think most people would agree that the quality of a democracy (or representative democracy) is directly proportional to how informed the public is. Granted currently our expectations are mostly unfair, we expect people to be publically infallible, which is why politicians think that kind of thing can help them. But expectations can be quickly changed if the rules change.
For those of us who do realise we argue, we protest, the government ignores us. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Ah yes.. the other side just doesn't realise then. Since obviously no one could support it if they understood as well as I understand it. Since they aren't protesting it, they must be therefore be dumber then myself.
That post was dripping with arrogance, and if you want people to take you seriously maybe it's time to tone it down.
Wow I'm glad you cured me of my mistake. For a second I thought these RFID were just RFID's, but little did I know these RFID crawl around planting cameras in peoples homes and brainwashing people. I was never aware the RFID's were that advanced.
There's a big difference between surveillance in public and surveillance in private. As long as you're on public roads, you should expect to be observed. I and everyone else pays to keep that road maintained and safe. The consequence of which is the public has the right to assure that individuals using that road doesn't hinder the safety of that road. If I step in your home or your shop, I assume you could be recording my actions.
I'm concerned about transponders for every person. I'm concerned about the security of its implementation. I'm concerned about the cost. I'm concerned about side-effects. But mostly I'm concerned the reason it won't happen is merely irrational fears. It should happen, and its time the government got off it's ass and prepared for it.
Ask yourself whats the biggest threat to your safety and well-being right now and in the likely future? Do you find it more likely that you'll be wrongfully accused and sentenced to death or killed in the process of a repeat offender committing a crime? In the ideal world we'd have both our privacy and there'd be world peace and good will towards all. It's not an ideal world though and there are tradeoffs. I consider public surveillance worth the improvements in law enforcement, obviously not everyone agrees.
But if you prefer it in slippery slope format here you are:
First the tinfoilers started insisting there shouldn't be surveillance in public places. That was fine, I didn't mind it. Then they expected no surveillance when they came into my home, well it was only polite I guess.
Then they asked that I don't look at them, because I was violating their privacy. Well they were whackos anyways, I could try to avoid interacting with them. Then they made the machines to pluck out everyone's eyeballs so no one would could violate their privacy. And we tried to stop them, but no one knew where they were.
I for one like my eyeballs...
All bought by one person. Who after SCO goes into bankruptcy is going to put the licenses on eBay and sell them at $1000 each!
anyone that uses Speakeasy know if they offer extra IP's for connection sharing?